Unfolding the Headline: Iterative Self-Questioning for News Retrieval and Timeline Summarization

1 Jan 2025  ·  Weiqi Wu, Shen Huang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Hai Zhao ·

In the fast-changing realm of information, the capacity to construct coherent timelines from extensive event-related content has become increasingly significant and challenging. The complexity arises in aggregating related documents to build a meaningful event graph around a central topic. This paper proposes CHRONOS - Causal Headline Retrieval for Open-domain News Timeline SummarizatiOn via Iterative Self-Questioning, which offers a fresh perspective on the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle the task of Timeline Summarization (TLS). By iteratively reflecting on how events are linked and posing new questions regarding a specific news topic to gather information online or from an offline knowledge base, LLMs produce and refresh chronological summaries based on documents retrieved in each round. Furthermore, we curate Open-TLS, a novel dataset of timelines on recent news topics authored by professional journalists to evaluate open-domain TLS where information overload makes it impossible to find comprehensive relevant documents from the web. Our experiments indicate that CHRONOS is not only adept at open-domain timeline summarization, but it also rivals the performance of existing state-of-the-art systems designed for closed-domain applications, where a related news corpus is provided for summarization.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here